The Bet

It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn night evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had been interesting conversations.

Among other things they had talking of capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom, where many journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out of data, immoral, and unsuitable. In the opinion of some of them, the death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.

"I don't agree with you,"said their host the banker. "I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life.

Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years? "

"Both are equally immoral, " observed one of the guests, "for they both the same object - to talk away life. The State is not God.

It has not the right to talk away what it cannot restorewhen it wants to. "

Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five -and - twenty. When he was

 opinion, he said:

      "The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral but if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at all. "

      A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the table with his fist and shouted at the younger man;

"It's not true! I'II bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years. "

"If you mean that in earnest, " said the young man, "I'II take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years. "The bet was set.

For the first years of his confinement, as far as one could judge from', his brief notes, the prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression. The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge. He refused wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote, excites the desires, and desires are the worst enemy of prisioner; and besides nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one. And tobacco spoilt the air of his room. In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character; novels with a complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories, and so on.

In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge, and the prisoner asked only for the classics. In the fifth year music was audible again, and the prisoner asked for wine.

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